“AMD is the market share leader by a landslide in DirectX 11 graphics,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD. “Through our sweet spot strategy and our open, industry standards approach, we’ve worked to deliver the best possible experience for gamers. Today, our laser focus on gamers continues with the introduction of what we think is far and away the best graphics card series today, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series. With exceptional game performance, an unrivaled feature set including breathtaking DirectX 11 gaming, AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology, AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing, and more, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series will have all gamers wanting to get Radeon in their systems.”

The first two cards released under the 6800 series are the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850. Both cards are built with AMD's 40nm chips with a 255mm die size, 1.7B transistors and feature 1GB of GDDR5 with a 256-bit memory interface and 32 render back-ends. The two cards sport a dual-slot design and provide 2 mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, 1 HDMI 1.4a connector, and 2 DVI ports with HD3D technology, AMD Eyefinity technology and AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration support.

Pricing is set at an MSRP of $239 for the Radeon HD 6870 and $179 for the Radeon HD 6850.